Technically you should be able to... but not sure you could call out a column name (if that's what you are trying to do) with the first part since it's going to wrap it in quotes within the query.
It would end up being a query like:
Code:
SELECT *
FROM EWRcanal_channels
WHERE 'type' = 'someValue'
Maybe I'm not thinking of something, but pretty sure the query will always return no records if $type and $data are different, and will return all records if they are the same.